CrunchBase, the business graph to TechCrunch’s business laugh, is launching a new feature here at Disrupt Europe in London. It’s a new events section that old CrunchBase is rolling out with some snazzy new features.
“With CrunchBase events, anyone in the community can add information about an event,” says CrunchBase president and my ex-boss Matt Kaufman.
Because it’s CrunchBase, the events information is linked to the individual’s profile, which means that it’s automatically updated with the most up-to-date biography in the database, and lists the individual’s past speaking engagements and future speaking plans.
“The event data is always up to date and you don’t have to worry about a biography being out of date,” Kaufman says.
Getting the event business into its dataset is a critical step for CrunchBase’s overall plans. Down the road, users can expect to see a lot of different tools built off of the data that CrunchBase will be collecting through corralling all of the data coming off of events.
“We think events are an important part of the startup ecosystem,” Kaufman says.
Though in its own blog, CrunchBase calls itself a global calendar for the technology community, it’s actually much more than that. The new events pages can also capture speakers, exhibitors, sponsors and awardees. The vision is that each event extends and strengthens the connections among people and companies.
Events pages will also allow those individual profiles to become more robust. Users navigating CrunchBase will be able to find when and where a specific venture capitalist was speaking and where they’ll be speaking next. Historical information about competitions and their winners also becomes easy to surface.
So far, roughly 60,000 people have written 300,000 profiles for CrunchBase.